


the small room closed in glass

by GStK



Series: i just finally heard that unnoticed silence of never having one again [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV, Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 07:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19146586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GStK/pseuds/GStK
Summary: we’re shouting the scene wherei swallow your heart and you make mespit it up again.





	the small room closed in glass

**Author's Note:**

> Final Fantasy XIV AU. Lucilius is an Elezen Astrologian. Belial is an Au'Ra Dark Knight.  
> Lucio is the Warrior of Light, though only briefly mentioned.  
> Spans ARR to the beginning of SB.  
> Second Person PoV.

halone is a man.

rebellion begins early, when your thoughts take form and scrape together across stained glass art of your land’s deity. curves and supple shapes that begin and end at the hard end of a spear: it’s not right. it’s not right, and you know this.

halone, the fury. flax-golden hair and a thin smile of judgement. in the cathedrals they sing hymns around you while you sit and page through sacred truth. before your legs can even touch down to the floor from the pews, you’re building your image, you’re souring the taste of milk and honey in your mouth, and you’re tossing aside scripture for something new. something right.

halone is a man. halone is strong, absolute. but the fury does not sit in hallowed halls and welcome the righteous; he takes flight on wild wings and delivers it himself. his face, it would look like yours, but with ears more rounded and a heart less hardened. he would be perfect.

the constellations and the morning star agree with you. your calculations and your brilliancy move mountains in ishgard. it is not long before they know you, equal in respect and fear.

* * *

the smarter of the dragonborn know to stay well away from your city, even further from coerthas. the bold try their luck. the foolish are slain. your spire echoes with tales of alarm, ringing so loudly in your ears that your theories tip and crack. you storm down the stairs, ignoring your fellows when they stare at you.

the highlands are drenched in snow. your robes slice a path through the top layer as you march west, covered up by newfall just moments after. perhaps if you were durendaire or dzemael, you would have your own tower. but you are more than what they say, you are a man without a house and only a name, only a mind. only more than enough.

you mutter a curse into the snow. a thick voice curses back. you barely glance at the half-submerged body. a black sclera and red eye meets your tepid gaze.

“are you bold or foolish?” you ask the buried au’ra, more corpse at this point than man.

still, he answers you. despite everything, he answers you. “i’m yours,” he laughs, gravely, like suicide and submission and solidarity in the face of death nipping at your toes.

you give him a volume and a thesis in a gaze, and then you turn on your heel, and you walk away. “you’re worthless,” you decide.

and he drags himself after you, blood and soot following you all the way to your abode.

* * *

he pretends he doesn’t know common. the name he gives you is one your ears don’t care for, so you give him a new one, and he laughs with all the knowledge he teases behind a black curtain. what he does not hide in his ignorance of the written word, and it falls to you to teach him. sometimes he hovers over your shoulder, fulms taller than some of your tallest peers. sometimes he sits and you dictate to him, your fingers dragging his over every character.

he pretends he doesn’t understand just to keep you close. his desire is plain and you find it disgusting. he hems and haws over letters you have taught him for hours. you debate dumping him back out into the snow, or handing him over to the guards for execution. he’s not much of a servant.

but, look: he maps out the limits of your patience in suns. just when you are about to bring your foot down, he points, and he smiles, and he shows you one of the flaws in your calculations. the silence builds and forms a protective bubble around the both of you, and while your mind runs away with itself, he brings an arm around you, tugs you close.

he’s right. you expel him from the home for the night, regardless.

* * *

you find an equal in a man born from dragons. none of your people can follow you, but he can. belial smirks and smooth talks his way through ishgard, bringing you food, bringing you supplies from the holy city. what is most important is that he brings new charts, and you spend your days poring over them, long having abandoned your post at the spire.

the tipping point of the gods. these laws, this physicality, it trembles when you begin to put your fingers to its pulse. cataclysm and calamity should have brought you all down just five summers ago but now all that’s left is winter.

all that’s left is him.

“i’m out of ink,” you tell him.

he opens his arms and body up to you, his black scales like feathers shattered and puncturing through his skin. he is physical and you are tangible. he’s so gladdened to have ripped your attention away from the stars that his cheeks are a little red.

“use mine,” he encourages.

so you pick up your spear. let’s begin.

* * *

dalamud’s dance continues to warp menphina and your star even in its absence. throw a big red ball at the world and it will continue to spin as though its menage-a-trois remains as three.

he tells you about their gossip -- about how everyone knows, about how giving shelter to dragonkind is sure to see your head lopped off in no time. when his babble about heretics won’t perk your ears, he sings songs of his people and his life in a land where helios rises first. and when your eyes slide to him,

why, does he think you won’t notice that little sway in the tip of his tail? or does he do it on purpose, just to show you what kind of effect you have on him.

there is more at work in this world than this haven of yours. the man making rumbles in eorzea with a face you hear is a little like yours -- he will be here in no time. belial flirts with his life when he suggests the two of you might wait for him, see what he’s like beneath silken sheets. a “warrior of light,” the speaker of hydaelyn can’t make anything but paradise with six hands and six legs, right?

you want to pluck out his eyes and sew his mouth shut. you want to place them in halone’s tipping scales of judgement and see where justice lies. you want to bring the gods to their knees and have them answer every question you’ve ever had.

you want to remember the fire brought on by dalamud and how you felt alive for the first and last time. you can feel the kiss of flame in his eyes, sometimes.

* * *

“knowing them,” he’s saying, stroking a hand over your arm, “they’re probably with the oronir right now. the big shots. they were always kind of leeches.”

“as you are,” you comment, skimming your quill over parchment.

“don’t be like that. i bring a lot to the table! see?” belial grips himself, showing you the whisper of physical evidence through the sheets, pooled around his hips. “i’m pretty gifted. wouldn’t you agree?”

“lacking in all other respects. i should have left you where i found you.”

“ouch! harsh,” he sighs. he draws you a little closer. you let him. “i’ve got plenty more stories to tell you. all you have to do is ask the right questions. like, ‘why did you come with all the raen?’ or ‘what is the azim steppe like?’ or--”

“i could not hardly care,” you speak. he sighs like rustling leaves at your winter breeze. he robs you of your work, and you glare at him, but he takes your chin and guides it up to make you meet his eyes. he likes pretending he has power.

you place one of your hands next to his hips as a brace in the mattress. the little quiver he gives shows his utter surrender.

“-- or, ‘what was the calamity like over there?’ you can go on and on with your predictions -- and they’re a work of brilliance, believe you me -- but numbers can’t tell you what really happened.”

he’s right. he’s right when you don’t like him to be. but you let him, for reasons that escape you. not everything can be known in numbers and constellations and pale fingers dancing along your shoulders as you read.

when you share a bed like this there can be no secrets. his physicality bends the laws that the holy see wants you to believe. your upbringing tells you to throw the cursed one out, the library inside you.

“tell me.”

he draws you into him, and he does.

* * *

your rare ventures into ishgard grow only further irritating with time. the twelve-cursed doppelganger has made his way in, and you are mistaken for him, half the time. your annoyance wins out over your care for delicacy and so you begin to take belial with you, when trips must be made.

he is a fine-suited mess of black with a rolling tongue and a charm that touches the hearts of weak ishgardian maidens. he’s easy to desire. men don’t have the audacity to challenge him. but they stare with their open mouths, the ones who still think dragonborn are the end to all things come.

once you are stopped. it is by a boy who mistakes you as the ward of house fortemps. he falters when he sees the fall of your robes, the void in your eyes, and the one by your side. you are chaos in a divine city. belial is curling his hand around yours and pushing you behind him, another hand minding the hilt at his back.

the boy cries in shock. belial smiles, offers reassurance with a serpentine tongue. the boy beseeches the twelve for the devilry he sees in front of him. heretics, he calls you. that same tired word.

by the time he has his knife out belial has already plunged through him. there’s no grit to his smile. the warmth that’s left your hand returns soon enough, curls between your fingers. belial offers the back of your palm a kiss.

a young man from the brume dies by the hand of an au’ra. it’s all for you, he swears. it’s all for you. it’s unnecessary.

but some men are so desperate to prove themselves. he picks you up and you shut your eyes to a foolish, snow-slaked city that will die on its own faithful blade.

* * *

“this is pretty bad,” belial comments from your sofa, rolling an apple between his fingers. “for real this time. i don’t think we can get away with this.”

they’ll raze your house. all of your research will be declared corrupt, sealed away by the voice of the archbishop. your moons have turned to suns with belial’s acts, and he wants to pretend that you were both a part of the trouble. he wants to pretend that the two of you belong together.

“belial: that’s the name of a daemon, right?” he asks you.

“what of it?”

“nothing. i just think it’s pretty fitting. i’ve always liked the sound of it.”

“and your original name?”

“doesn’t really matter any more, does it? i’m a buduga, or a xaela, or a dragonborn or a devil. whatever you want to call me, baby.”

you want to call him an idiot. you have to press your tongue to the bottom of your mouth, suppressing the wellspring of saliva and wanton urge to tell him you love him. he’s looking at you like you look at the stars. he’s holding the apple in both hands.

“and what would my name be?” you ask him. “in your tongue.”

“... _üüriin-tsolmor_ ,” he mutters, pondering the fruit as you get up from your seat and take steps to come upon him. “something like that. the morning star. the fall from grace. the beautiful one.”

you repeat it back, poorly. he smiles at your attempt. you come to lay against him, a hand at his neck, one on his breast.

“we don’t have very long, _minii khair_. let me take you away from here.”

and let all of your research go to waste. and let the twelve decide your fate. and allow halone to remain forever a woman in the halls of ishgard, and the influence of dalamud remain unspoken. you have a plan and everything could come together with an axe at your throat. it’s easy.

but god has decided that you are not done.

“by force,” you propose, tracing a finger around his sternum.

“that’s what we do, you know. that’s our thing. but we also take in the unwanted.” as you did for him, he seems to want to propose, but he knows to keep his mouth shut.

you sit up so your eyes are level with his, and so are his hips. his jutting horns frame your face and pull some of your hair aside.

“what is the azim steppe like?” you ask.

he smiles. you are physical and he is tangible. his arms encase you and your revolution comes to a stop with him.

“let me tell you a story.”

let’s begin.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary adapted from works by Richard Siken.


End file.
